Google Workspace offboarding, done without data loss

Reset the password and sign the user out of all sessions first, so nothing changes underneath you. Then revoke OAuth tokens and application-specific passwords, which survive a password reset and are routinely missed. Then transfer Drive ownership to the named successor. Then handle mail: either delegate the mailbox to a manager for a defined period, or move the account to an archived licence so Vault keeps it searchable.

Calendar comes next, and it is the step people skip. Recurring events organised by the leaver do not transfer with the account, so a weekly team meeting quietly loses its organiser and stops being editable. Finally, suspend the account. Deletion, if it happens at all, happens after the retention period you have agreed in writing.

A suspended account still consumes a licence. Organisations with steady turnover accumulate suspended accounts and pay full seat price for each one indefinitely, which is one of the more common sources of quiet Workspace overspend we find.

The archived user licence exists precisely for this: it costs materially less than a full seat, keeps the data searchable in Vault, and removes interactive access. For any organisation with a retention obligation and turnover above a handful of people a year, the arithmetic is not close.

Three failures recur. Shared drive membership is removed before anyone checks whether the leaver was the only manager, which leaves a drive nobody can administer. Files in My Drive that were shared with the team are lost from view when the account is suspended, because sharing survives but discovery does not. And third-party integrations authenticated as the leaver stop working days later, usually the integration that syncs something to finance.

All three are prevented by a written checklist that includes a discovery step rather than starting with revocation. Twenty minutes of checking beats a week of reconstruction.

Offboarding is a process problem, not a technical one. The technical steps are unremarkable; the reason they go wrong is that the person doing them is under time pressure and working from memory on a Friday afternoon.

We hand over a one-page checklist tied to your actual org structure, with the successor for each department already named, plus an optional Apps Script that performs the mechanical steps and writes an audit line per leaver. The audit line is what lets you answer, months later, exactly what happened to someone's data.